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Creating the ‘Coolest Spot in Universe’

NASA will send an ice box (called Cold Atom Laoratory or CAL) to the International Space Station (ISS) in August abroad the SpaceX CRS-12. The box is supposed to freeze gas atoms to create the coolest spot in the universe, which in turn might help to understand more about gravity and dark matter.

The box has lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic ‘knife’. These will all be used to cancel out the energy of gas particles and slow them down until eventually they are motionless.

When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over. Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves.